Mari Liano Wins Her First — and Shares the Summit with CC Castaneda
After five tournaments with little to show on paper, Mari Liano finally has a win to her name. The IFPA #51,389 entrant closed out the fifth night of OC Belles & Chimes Season 22 at Captain’s Arcade Showroom sitting on top of the standings — though not by herself. She shares first place with CC Castaneda, each of them carrying four game wins out of six through a single round of group match play.
Nine players split into three-player groups on a clear, mild Anaheim evening, and by the time the last ball drained roughly an hour and a half later, the top of the podium had room for two. For Liano, whose only recent outing had ended 39th at a Pins & Pirates league night in April, that shared summit is the first real result of a young competitive record.
Jungle Queen Sets Liano on Her Way
Liano drew a group with Stephanie Diaz and Amanda Little, and the tone was set early on Jungle Queen. On the 1977 Gottlieb — an Ed Krynski design wrapped in Gordon Morison art, built around drop-target banks that feed the end-of-ball bonus — she came out on top of the three-player game, with Diaz second and Little third. It’s a table that rewards patience with the drops: clear a bank and you light a lane worth 5,000, and the bonus climbs the whole way.
From there she stacked wins where it counted. Liano took both James Bond tables in the room, the 007 LE and the 60th Anniversary LE, and added Pulp Fiction (SE) to the pile. Her only stumbles came on Pokémon (Premium) and Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye (Pro), where she landed third. Across the six games she and Little shared, Liano finished ahead in four; she did the same to Diaz. For a player with five career ranked events to her name, it added up to a maiden win.
CC Castaneda’s Four-Win Night in Her Own Room
If Liano’s win was a first, Castaneda’s was a homecoming of sorts. She runs the OC Belles & Chimes night, and by the regulars’ account she’s also the one who keeps this showroom’s machines in playing shape. On the night, she matched Liano step for step, putting up the top score on four of the six machines she played.
Castaneda opened by taking Creature from the Black Lagoon and never let the group get away from her, adding Laser Cue, Transformers (Pro), and Counterforce to her tally. The two she gave up — Bad Girls and Jack•Bot — both went to Malvina Segura, who made her presence felt in that pod. Ranked #378 of 1,977 California players in the NACS standings, Castaneda finished the night ahead of two longtime measuring sticks: her season-long, 11-tournament back-and-forth with Amanda Little is level again, and so is a similarly close run of shared events with Hillary Jacobson.
The Beatles Faceoff and a Third-Place Deadlock
Third place came down to a group that refused to separate. Laura Stoddard and Hillary Jacobson tied for the spot, splitting the six games they shared three apiece, with Sheri Howell filling out the pod. The early swing came on The Beatles (Gold), an eight-minute game that Stoddard edged out over Jacobson.
Stoddard also outlasted the field on Frontier, the night’s longest single game at 27 minutes — a genuine grind while the quicker tables around it turned over three and four times. Jacobson answered on Monster Bash and Count-Down, and Howell claimed Metallica Remastered (LE) and Pokémon (Premium) to keep everyone honest. The Stoddard–Jacobson pairing runs seven shared events deep now; tonight it was dead even, with Stoddard still holding a slim edge across the longer arc.
Five Years On, The Mandalorian Still Draws a Crowd
Off to the side of the tournament pods, one machine was quietly marking a milestone. Stern’s The Mandalorian (LE) turns five this month, released in June 2021 and still pulling players onto the showroom floor. Designed by Brian Eddy with art by Randy Martinez, the limited edition ran to just 750 units and carries a Grogu sculpture as its signature toy. The scoring rewards the greedy: light the +1x Playfield through Scope, Hunter, and the Boba Fett target pair, stack all three, and the machine kicks up to a 6x multiplier — and those Fett targets can buy back time on the clock.
That it still commands attention says something about the room itself. Captain’s Arcade keeps dozens of machines running, old Gottliebs and Ballys alongside current Stern releases, and holds a 4.8 rating from the players who make the trip to La Palma Avenue. On a weeknight, it’s the kind of floor where a 1977 drop-target game and a 2021 licensed epic sit a few steps apart, both getting played.
What a First Win Means for Liano’s Season
For Castaneda, the shared win is one more strong night at a room she knows better than anyone. For Liano, it’s a different kind of marker — her first tournament win in only her fifth ranked event, and the start of a competitive record that had almost nothing on it a day ago. It’s the sort of result that turns a name near the bottom of the state standings into one worth watching, and it happened alongside the organizer’s own name at the top of the sheet.
The season rolls on from here, and the next OC Belles & Chimes night will tell whether this was a breakout or a one-off. Either way, Liano leaves Captain’s Arcade with something she didn’t have walking in.
Final podium — OC Belles & Chimes, Season 22, #5:
- 1st (tie): CC Castaneda, Mari Liano
- 3rd (tie): Laura Stoddard, Hillary Jacobson
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